Starring: Bogusław Linda, Aleksandra Justa, Zofia Wichłacz, Krzysztof Pieczyński
Directed by: Andrzej Wajda
Rating: ★★★☆☆
What Andrzej Wajda’s legacy will mean to future generations? The Polish director honored for the very last time his nation and international audiences alike with Powidoki (Afterimage), a one-hander devoted to the personal battle of avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński with the soviet-imposed dogma of social realism in Poland in the early Fifties. Appearances can be deceiving sometimes on the big screen too. After all, it would have been unreasonable to expect the nonagenarian director, who passed away in Warsaw on the 9th October 2016, to indulge himself with experimentation behind the camera, especially in the final stage of his career.
The iconoclastic fury displayed by the protagonist in one of the opening scene, in which Strzemiński (Bogusław Linda) lacerates a Stalin banner covering the window of his flat in Lodz still doesn’t make Afterimage one of the most audacious pieces of filmmaking delivered by the Polish director. Wajda’s final movie exudes his endless worship for visual arts which had never waned even after he abandoned painting in 1949. The main character doesn’t make any compromises with the power and condensates in a low-key picture the iron, marble and hope, in other words, all the moral qualities displayed by the oppressed protagonists of Wajda’s celebrated ‘Man’ trilogy. The initiator of Unism art movement is portrayed with self-composure and stoicism by Linda despite the physical infirmity that burdened Strzemiński in the last period of his life.
Poland’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy in 2016 is a low-key Kurosawa-esque but rigorous testament to artistic freedom from the most grandiose cineaste in the history of his country.
Review published by Kino Mania on June 15, 2021